Ben Lee’s Music Video Shoot Derailed

New York City's finest cancel the Australian singer/songwriter's shoot due to indecent exposure.

In preparation for the release of his Ripe, collaboration heavy new record, Ben Lee took to the streets of New York City over the weekend to film the music video for “Love Me Like the World is Ending,” the album’s first single. But in the process the Aussie singer/songwriter ran into a few problems, specifically a pack of nude skateboarders.

“The concept was basically a one-shot video based around people doing what they would do on the last day of earth,” Lee wrote to his MySpace blog Saturday (July 21). “This was a finely tuned piece of choreography that involved hours of rehearsal to get the sequence of characters to interact at the right time. People were making out, dancing, crying, a businessman and a homeless guy were sharing a sandwich, a Rabbi and a Muslim were sharing a prayer, there was a unicorn (why not?), and there were some teenagers skateboarding nude through Soho… the idea was that they would wear nude-coloured underwear, and be blurred out to give the effect of them being naked. Well… something must have gotten lost in the translation… the skateboarders evidently dropped their shorts and skated down Crosby St. fully exposed! This would not have been a problem except that some of New York City’s Finest saw the display, and pretty quickly stepped in to stop filming. Our shooting permit was then revoked, leaving us with an unusable half a take of a very expensive video shoot!”

Luckily, for all you voyeurs and Lee devotees alike, the brief footage from the scrapped video shoot — the very first take — has hit YouTube.com and is available now for your viewing pleasure. But Lee plans to return to the streets to complete the video although he assures fans the defunct attempt is “a little piece of history,” which documents “the day Ben Lee got busted for indecent exposure!”